Stud­ies have been done, so­lu­tions have been of­fered and the au­thor­i­ties have promised over and over again that T&T's chron­ic traf­fic woes will soon come to an end.How­ev­er, all those plans and promis­es have brought no re­lief to the thou­sands of dri­vers and com­muters who have, over the past few days, been suf­fer­ing through more se­vere traf­fic grid­lock than ever.

This pre­dictable wors­en­ing of the sit­u­a­tion at the height of the Car­ni­val sea­son un­der­scores the woe­ful in­ad­e­qua­cy of T&T's road­ways, which can­not ac­com­mo­date huge vol­umes of traf­fic.The sit­u­a­tion is caused by an ab­sence of an ef­fi­cient pub­lic trans­port sys­tem, weak traf­fic man­age­ment sys­tems and non-ex­is­tent law en­force­ment. At peak times there are more than 30,000 ve­hi­cles per hour on the main roads and high­ways–three times the lim­it at which a mass tran­sit sys­tem should be in­tro­duced.

In these cir­cum­stances, the Gov­ern­ment must, as a mat­ter or ur­gency, en­sure that more pub­lic trans­porta­tion in­fra­struc­ture is put in place, or re­vi­talised.Be­fore the elec­tion of 2010, fea­si­bil­i­ty and en­gi­neer­ing de­sign works were com­plet­ed for a rapid rail­way sys­tem to op­er­ate sep­a­rate and apart from the con­gest­ed road net­work. How­ev­er, that plan was shelved by the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship, which claimed some $500 mil­lion has been wast­ed on the project which it deemed un­fea­si­ble.

Three years lat­er, apart from the con­tro­ver­sial San Fer­nan­do to Point Fortin high­way project, there are no ini­tia­tives in sight to ease the grow­ing traf­fic con­ges­tion. In any case, build­ing an ad­e­quate road sys­tem and high­way in­fra­struc­ture to catch up with the dras­tic in­crease in the num­ber of cars on the road is at best a long-term mea­sure which is not like­ly to of­fer more than par­tial re­lief. Ge­o­graph­i­cal and phys­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions mean that high­ways alone can­not solve the prob­lem.

The oth­er op­tion for tak­ing thou­sands of com­muters off the roads, par­tic­u­lar­ly at peak traf­fic times, is the wa­ter-taxi ser­vice. But even there, the plan is to scale back, even shelve, rather than ex­pand. Sail­ings be­tween Port-of-Spain and San Fer­nan­do have been re­duced and the Gov­ern­ment will not be adding Point Fortin and oth­er routes to the ser­vice.The ar­gu­ment is that the wa­ter-taxi ser­vice is heav­i­ly sub­sidised and is not eco­nom­i­cal­ly vi­able.

How­ev­er, the re­al­i­ty is that T&T's in­ef­fi­cient and in­ef­fec­tive traf­fic sys­tem takes a toll on eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty, pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and ef­fi­cien­cy well above and be­yond the cost of op­er­at­ing an ef­fi­cient pub­lic trans­port sys­tem.In­tro­duc­ing rapid tran­sit would ef­fec­tive­ly re­duce–per­haps even elim­i­nate–traf­fic con­ges­tion, since be­tween 600 and 800 pas­sen­gers could be ac­com­mo­dat­ed in a sin­gle train and hun­dreds more on mo­tor fer­ries, re­plac­ing the hun­dreds of cars, maxi taxis and bus­es need­ed to trans­port that num­ber of peo­ple on con­gest­ed road­ways.

On an av­er­age work­ing day, 500,000 or more peo­ple from all parts of the coun­try en­ter and ex­it Port-of-Spain. That con­ver­gence cre­ates a dai­ly bot­tle­neck in the cap­i­tal alone and the sit­u­a­tion is not much bet­ter in ma­jor towns across the coun­try.By pro­vid­ing rail and sea trans­port sys­tems, these hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple and their cars can be tak­en off the road­ways.